


Of Brick and of Bone

by persnickett



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, TMR Reverse Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 01:43:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20845472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: Of brick and of bone,Of petal and thorn,My love is my harbour, my hearth and my home.





	1. Brick

**Author's Note:**

> This is written for the [TMR Reverse Bang, 2019](https://mazerunnerbang.tumblr.com/).
> 
> I was paired with [fansarewaiting](https://fansarewaiting.tumblr.com) on tumblr who made the lovely harmonious, evocative moodboard you can find [here](https://fansarewaiting.tumblr.com/post/188064575496/tmr-reverse-bang-mazerunnerbang-of-brick-and), and said:
> 
> _Newt and Thomas move into a beautiful old house with the intent of fixing it up and flipping it back onto the market. They're partners in the business of flipping houses and moving on to the next, but there's something charming and ethereal about this house that makes them think they can be more than just business partners, maybe lovers._

The old house sits high on a hill, not far out of town.

Vines have overgrown the wide windows that once let in the sun. The proud portico, once luxuriant and welcoming, is long sagged and crumbling. But its bones remain unbroken, still standing and weatherfast enough that the key can still turn smoothly in the lock, miraculously untouched through the years by rust.

The slow, heavyset slide of the latch scrapes through the cavernous silence inside, a klaxon heralding this new arrival.

A wedge of light presses in through the opening door, a brilliant growing triangle falling on the wall and spilling wide over the floor. A rush of life and sunlight and air races swiftly in, all the way to the attic, and there is a man standing in the hall.

He is young, and straight-shouldered strapping. With a set of happy brown eyes sweeping appraisingly around himself and a smile on his face to rival the light now pouring eagerly in behind him.

“Wow.” He says it under his breath, brunet head nodding appreciatively as he looks from the sweeping old balustrade and around, to the years that have lain themselves in layers of dust on the shelves and the sills.

“We’ll get you all fixed up.” The promise brings the young man stepping inside, hand passing reverently over the peeling plaster, and coming to rest on the ruin of what used to be the newel post. Addressing himself to the very air, the walls around him. “I’m Thomas.”

_Thomas_. The old house echoes it warmly off her walls, down the long curve of the staircase; rebounding from the cold marble around the fireplace. _Welcome_.

~ ~ ~

Thomas is awakened from a deep, peaceful-looking sleep in the smallest hours of the night, by the sounds of the disturbance taking place in the kitchen.

His eyes are bleary but widely alert as he moves through the dark toward the harried sounds of sharp bumping and hushed rustling. His breathing is carefully even, his bare feet quiet on the stairs – the day’s curious surveying and exploration having already taught him to avoid the squeaky one, second from the top – and his agile, work-calloused fingers are wrapped nimbly around the wooden baseball bat brought in from the dinged and scuffed utility truck now resting in the driveway. Following his discovery of the disgracefully sized mound of evidence left by the raccoons that liked to tear at the soffit, during his inspection of the shingles, and the cigarette-butt-and-beery-pint-can remains of more than one visit by local youths to the potting shed with the broken padlock out in the yard.

“_Christ_.”

Another loud clatter and banging from the cabinets, and Thomas’ step slows in the hall. His hold on the bat slips smoothly from handle to barrel and his free hand moves to rub sheepishly at the back of his neck, as he enters the kitchen with the understanding dawning all over his features that the source of the commotion is no break-in, ring-tailed or otherwise.

“Ouch. Where in the bloody, buggering, f— _Hello_?” Their new arrival whirls around in the dark, on the realization that he isn’t alone. “Sorry for all the racket, I was trying to find a light switch, but…”

“Oh! Right, sorry.” Thomas snaps his fingers, turning to slide by him in the narrow space of the kitchen, bare feet hop-skidding a little in his haste to flip on the switch of the task lighting he has set up on the counter. “The power isn’t on yet, the guy is coming tomorrow to—”

The unnatural, orange-y light buzzes to life, and Thomas trails off as the new presence among them is revealed, painted in tones of shadow and sepia. A pair of sunglasses are jammed up into a wild-looking thatch of flaxen-gilt hair even though it is the middle of the night, and a cardboard coffee cup sits clutched heedlessly in one slim-fingered hand. 

He blinks a striking dark pair of eyes that gleam a touch blearily from a set of sylphlike features, and smiles slightly crookedly.

Thomas blinks back. And jams a hasty hand out into the air for him to shake.

“Thomas,” Thomas introduces himself, belatedly.

“Newt.”

“Right. Nice to— I mean I don’t know if WhatsApp counts as having ‘met’ before but. Yeah, I. Wasn’t expecting you to be s—”

Newt arches a singular eyebrow. Thomas lets go of his hand. “So.” He rubs his palm nervously over the hip of his shorts. “…England.”

“What gave me away?” Newt’s tone is dry but his smile spreads and evens out as he looks down at himself, only for it to flicker out into irritation as he discovers his rumpled button-down is half drenched in spilled coffee. “Bloody hell,” he swears ironically. “D’you mind, Tommy?”

And then Thomas is staring awkwardly at the darkened tile floor, politely averting his eyes as his new companion thrusts his coffee cup boldly into his hand, the better to shrug lightly out of his jacket and begin stripping off his soiled outer layer to reveal a thin sleeveless singlet that shows off lean, slender-muscled arms and a sharp-boned clavicle adorned with a fine gold chain Newt wears clasped around his pale neck.

“Pretty town,” Newt says offhandedly, draping his removed layers insouciantly over one bare shoulder and obligingly taking back his cup. “From what I could make out from a cab window at night, anyway.” A glint of mischief enters his eyes as they travel over the semi-clothed state of Thomas’ flimsy cotton t-shirt and shorts, to land pointedly on the bat still clutched in his left hand. “Haven’t quite decided how to feel about the Welcome Wagon though.”

Thomas’ hand makes an aborted movement, like it is about to scratch nervously at the back of his neck again but he straightens his shoulders, settles for a bashful smile instead.

“I wasn’t expecting you ’til tomorrow,” he explains, hand with the bat moving behind his back in more of a gesture of apology than any attempt to actually hide it from sight.

“I texted you my flight schedule? Said about one, your time?”

“Yeah, I realized _after_ I grabbed the bat that you probably meant AM, not PM.”

Newt’s laugh is a low, melodious thing. And Thomas’ grin hasn’t been this bright since he first walked in and stood beaming around himself in the front hall.

“Lemme show you your room. The place is great! I can’t wait to show her to you in the light…”

Their words carry into the hallway, and follow them up the stairs, hushed excitement obvious in their overstimulated midnight voices and the muted optimism on their faces lit by the amber glow of the task lantern held intrepidly in Thomas’ hand, and they trade their stories of what has brought them here. This business the two of them seemingly share, that they call ‘flipping’ properties.

Thomas has been doing it a while but this is his first time investing his own capital, he says. Newt has taken quite a few jobs like this one, and while he admits that sometimes his clients can be pretty controlling and picky, he assures Thomas that this time around their investment partner hasn’t given much in the way of instruction, seemingly only interested in the money from the sale.

“So. All yours, far as I’m concerned.” Newt pledges, leaning himself against the doorframe to the room Thomas has chosen for him – the larger one, incidentally, than his own. “First thing in the morning, as long as the summer lasts.”

He gives a wide yawn into the back of his hand that Thomas catches and then duplicates as if it were contagious. “Well. Maybe not _first_ thing.”

Back in his bedroom, Thomas lies on his makeshift cot, shoulders drawn tight in a new and unfamiliar tension, fingers tapping in agitation against his chest as if thoroughly vexed by this revelation of his partner’s decadent swath of hair the colour of sunshine on straw, pushed carelessly back from an enigmatic dark gaze and amused half-quirk of a smile. The airy, straight-backed perfect posture in his lissom, lean-hipped frame and the inviting note of adventure ringing in a cavalier nickname, tossed casually out in his subtle come-from-away voice.

“Well.” Thomas sighs, staring wakefully now into his own eyes peering back at him from the dusty old mirror left propped up in the corner, in its ornate and battered filigree frame.

The little growl of irritation that escapes him sounds as distinctly inconvenienced as the question he aims dolefully at the ceiling. “What are we gonna do about _that_?”

~ ~ ~

Her two newcomers settle into a comfortable routine. Thomas brews them coffee in the mornings, Newt, tea in the afternoons, and they sit at the rickety little card table they set up in the kitchen. Pouring over broad spreads of Newt’s drawings and plans, passing mugs of steaming drinks and murmured thank-yous between them, and dreaming.

And they set about their work.

Newt is concerned with the ‘curb appeal’. They go out to the garden, where there is weeding and digging and pruning enough to keep their backs bent and forearms swiping the sweat from their brows for days, and Newt teaches Thomas the way to clear out the climbing ivy without tearing the mortar from her walls.

“Tommy, stop!” He laughs, merrily. “They’re just plants, for Christ’s sake. You’ll bring the whole bloody house down.”

And Thomas grins at the way the sun finds its way into Newt’s hair and sits gleaming off the platinum strands threaded in amongst the gold, and he listens. Letting go his fistfuls of tough, waxy greenery, straightening his spine and dusting his hands on the backs of his trouser legs to take in each and every word of wisdom about suckers and micro tendrils and clipping from the roots first.

“You know,” Newt’s trowel delves firmly in to the parched grey crust of the garden bed, turning up the rich, dark loam waiting beneath. “Where I come from there are buildings they say are only kept standing because of the ivy holding them together…”

The strong stone walls stretch skyward above their heads, standing free once again in the breeze. Windows are opened to the light, eaves unchoked, dormers and shutters revealed again to the wide world; fractured and broken and peeling. And Thomas adds the scraping and sanding, replacement and repair to their growing list of schemes.

Thomas, for his part, is most focused on what he calls the ‘structural integrity’. He prioritizes the broken and boarded window to the cellar, and the wounded places in the walls, where the cornices have come away and the lath shows through the crumbling plaster.

They start with the sanding. Newt doesn’t speak to her, not directly – whispering private little compliments and encouragements into the rounding of a bulkhead, or smiling down at a badly notched baseboard and murmuring subconscious little reassurances and optimistic little tidbits of all their plans, like Thomas does. But the joy that glitters to life in his expressive dark eyes is deeper than Thomas’ bright and obvious enthusiasm, quieter. And he stands in the middle of the hard walnut wood floors with his sketchbook for hours, moving them over the grand archways and the sweeping staircase and dilapidated French doors leading out to the balcony like they are seeing it all for the memory of what it once was. What it could be.

What, if the two of them have their way, it will be again.

The electric sander Thomas prefers for its speed – the better to watch his progress around the walls of a room unfold like the leaves of an old, well-loved storybook – throws a silty white fog of plaster up into the returned sunlight that streams in, now, through the windows. Briefly billowing clouds settling and falling from the air when he stops, coming down over his head and his shoulders and coating his skin in comical, cakey-white. Newt takes better to the detail work, the corners and mouldings, wielding his wood block and rough paper with an artist’s peaceable intensity and focus.

“You look like an old man.”

Thomas pulls down his dust mask to show off his teasing smile as their work brings them shoulder to shoulder in the corner of the dining room. He lets it settle around his neck to deliver the words, reaching out a hand to brush indicatively at the way a fine coating of the dust has powdered Newt’s light hair and eyebrows to an almost-shade of mock silver.

Newt frowns, his own hand rising in the wake of Thomas’ touch to push self-consciously into the crown of his hair, only to chuckle along with him when it sends a thin cascade of white down through the air to the floor.

“Well you have me beat then,” he banters back, swiping a finger over Thomas’ t-shirt near the collar, to bring it away covered in a much more liberal coating than his own. “As you’ve passed on and made a ghost already.”

Thomas smiles wide enough to dimple his cheeks even under their layers of white.

“Hang on.”

Then his beloved power tool is put aside in favour of fishing deep in his pocket for his phone, and the two of them crowd together in front of the plastic sheets they have taped up over the doorway and the fireplace to pull silly, chalk-white faces for the camera. 

And the empty old house begins to feel full again, brimming with light and mess and noise, voices and laughter.

~ ~ ~

Newt goes out, always in his casually chaotic whirlwind of aviator shades, bare arms and cigarettes and the uncouth roaring-to-life of the truck’s engine to return with milk, custom door knobs and antique light fixtures. He brings home paint chips in countless indistinguishable shades of oatmeal to spread out over the sawdusty kitchen countertop and argue with himself over for hours, while Thomas chews his lip and nods agreeably and his eyes stray helplessly to the way Newt’s teeth toy pensively with the straw of his iced coffee that has been empty now for ages.

Thomas is chivvied out of the house to leave Newt to the edgework and painting on more than one occasion, and not one of them goes by without at least one message lighting the screen of Newt’s phone that makes him smile silently down at it, shaking his paint-speckled head ruefully before tucking it away and going back to his work humming a tellingly jaunty tune.

And when Thomas comes back, it is always to throw open every window, full of chiding about fumes and self care and bringing with him as always a wash of sunlight and new air. Along with freshly cut lumber, tiles, and paving stones. A little silver figurine of a lobster to place on the sill of the kitchen window that he insists is named Cortez.

It is on one of these occasions Thomas returns to find the house strangely quiet of the sounds of scraping and hammering, or Newt’s colourful cursing echoing in the hall. There is something else, instead. The entire house thrumming and alive with it, vibrations subtly moving the air and breathing through the walls, pulsing in the very floorboards like the rhythm of an awakening heart.

Thomas follows it through the house, head raised and alert like a spaniel scenting the air. Tracking the way the sensation grows from a feeling to an audible sound up the stairs and to the back of the hall, to stop uncertainly at the door to the library.

Newt stands with his back to him, bracketed by the slanting shafts of sunlight angling in from the arched windows. His head is bent gracefully, watching the nimble movement of his slim fingers where they curl around the long neck of the instrument he has slung on a strap over his angular shoulder and humming lyrically along with the chords he plucks from the strings to hang in the air around them, low and reverberating.

The minutes that slip by as Thomas stands in the hall – transfixed by the rhythmic nod of Newt’s head, the slight shift and sway of his hip in time with the melody he plays along to, pumped softly from the laptop computer he has placed in the centre of the floor on an overturned milk crate – are by far the longest moments outside of sleep that Thomas has held himself still, even once, since he arrived.

It might have gone on for hours if Thomas didn’t give himself away chuckling in fond surprise when Newt’s finger slips, the note jarring and off-time with the accompanying melody, and shattering the unexpected baritone silk of his humming into a trademark British curse.

“Oh!” Newt curses again, turning rather awkwardly with his encumbrance. “Shit, Tommy. I didn’t hear you come— what’s this?”

Curiosity sweeps the apologetic expression from Newt’s features as he leans to the side, ducking his head under his guitar strap to extricate himself and snapping the still-quietly-playing laptop shut to silence it.

“Ohhh,” he intones soberly, stepping forward to see what Thomas is holding in his hands, “you haven’t brought this poor thing home with you to die a slow and unnatural death have you?”

“Nah. Don’t listen to him, buddy,” Thomas murmurs, ducking his head to address the potted plant he has been cradling one-armed against his chest. “You’re in the _best_ hands,” he asserts, taking it between his own allegedly lethal ones to thrust it ceremoniously out toward Newt. “It’s for you.”

“Me?”

“I mean I was at the Home and Garden Centre and I thought. Because you. You know, you knew so much about the ivy.” Thomas’ voice drops by a notch. “And I’ve seen your sketchbook…”

And not only his sketchbook. Even the corners and margins of their planning drafts sometimes sported the evidence of where Newt’s mind went, left to wander free and doodle – images fading in from nothing, only to take root and grow right off the edge of the page. Entire suggested worlds only ever seen by Newt’s mind’s eye, disappearing just out of reach before they could even begin to be born: gnarled, wintry branches stretching their skeletal fingers up against the charcoal black of a starlit sky; the lush, feathered fronds of a grove of forest fern; fat, cheerful acorns and the warty, curl-edged dragon’s hide surface of a fallen autumn leaf.

There is one in particular of robust and ropey, almost sinister looking, vines, climbing up a towering stone wall. Tough and tangled and dotted here and there with the tiniest, intricately detailed white flowers.

Newt smiles, but solemn and far-away, like he has given something away he hadn’t intended to part with.

“Suppose I do miss my garden, almost as much as I miss my old band,” he admits, with a look over his shoulder at his closed laptop. “Well, it’s just the balcony of my flat, really, but I’ve got a couple of pots out there. Sweet pea to climb up the railing on the side that actually gets some sun – which we don’t much, of course, it is London – and a little bonsai tree. It’s not much but I’d guess I spend probably eighty percent of my time out there, when I get my way. Just makes it a bit nicer spot, you know. To have a smoke, or to write down a song. …Or try anyway.” Newt smiles a little less wistfully this time, and he reaches out to finger a leaf lovingly. “My ex is taking care of the watering for me.”

“Oh,” says Thomas. And there is something in the syllable that weights it down, drops it heavily into the room between them. “That’s nice of him— or. Her, or—“

“_He_,” Newt corrects firmly, taking hold of the pot to slide it from between Thomas’ hands, “is called Alby. And yes, he is. Whether he likes anybody to know it or not.”

“Sorry. About your breakup.” Thomas’ freed hands find their way into his pockets. “I mean, I don’t know how long it’s been, but…”

Newt lifts his gaze to regard him a second or two over the spry, spritely greenery. Something softly knowing quirks the edge of his mouth upward.

“It’s been long enough.”

“Good,” Thomas answers, slightly breathless, “that. That’s good.”

Newt looks back down at the pot in his hands.

“Thank you, Tommy.” His eyes stay averted as he pushes his fingers into the dirt, gauging its type and moisture, and checks the little plastic garden shop label tucked into the soil. _Rosa Constance Spry_, it reads. _English Rose_. “…You’re very sweet.”

Thomas’ eyes brighten at the compliment, but there is a shadow of something momentary and dark, almost sad, that flits across Newt’s expression as he turns, moving across the room to settle his gift solicitously with both his hands in the large arched window, where the cut and leaded glass sends refracted rainbow shards of sunlight scattering out over the sill to the floor.

“So.” Thomas trails after him, hands still pocketed and his tone a clear acknowledgement that the topic of conversation has been firmly changed. “Tell me about this band.”

So they perch themselves on the wide ledge where the panes can let in the late afternoon light to warm their backs, and they stretch their legs comfortably out onto the dusty walnut floor, and Newt does. 

He tells him all about each of the members, and about how his crush on the cute drummer once upon a time might just have been how he figured out that he was gay.

He tells him how they were nearly really something a couple of years ago. How most of them have gone their separate ways now, but – as he has always found that the sillier the dream, the harder it is to let go – they still make a point to get together when they are all in the same town.

He tells Thomas how he’s most likely nothing more than a ‘daft idiot’ for lugging the bass guitar, now laid abandoned in the corner, all the way across two continents and rather a large ocean even though he didn’t have his amp. Just to try to keep their old songs from slipping away, not ready even after this much time to let go of what he calls the ‘muscle memory’ of the notes that still linger in his limbs and the tips of his fingers.

And before he lies down to sleep that night, Thomas gets out his computer and types the words _The Apologies, London indie band_ into his search, and makes a note on his To Do list to prioritize his repairs to the balcony.

It is not long after that, when Newt’s eyes wander from the measurements and complicated engineering calculations Thomas has scribbled onto his sketches of the front hall and the verandah, as they are wont to do when Thomas’ back is turned – watching the arch of his nape as he bends to examine his work or the shift of the muscles across his shoulders, the tension in his bicep as Thomas pulls up a broken floorboard, with quiet interest. But this time is different. This time the cool intrigue in his gaze catches on the little buds stuffed into Thomas’ ears, trailing stringy white cords down into his pocket. This time, Newt’s eyebrows contract in a frown, trying to place something, wrestling suddenly with the stark familiarity of the lyrics Thomas is singing idly along to under his breath as he works.

So on the night that Thomas leaves his little device out on the counter in the darkened kitchen, it is that same bemused expression that sits etched across Newt’s finely wrought features. He reaches out to take it in hand slowly, delicately built fingers unraveling the long white cords wrapped neatly round and round, less with an unbridleable curiosity than with a blunt and decided purpose – only hesitating for a moment before he tucks one of the buds into his ears and clicks its little wheel. The look that enters Newt’s dark eyes is not one of surprise for the familiar notes, the strains of his own voice that greet him, but more as if they hold an answer to something he has been longing to know.

Newt plucks the ear bud free by the cord to tuck it securely back into place, and he smiles.

~ ~ ~

Thomas stirs under his layers of sheets and his soft blue comforter. He sits up, blinking in the dark to make out the shape of Newt standing shadowed in the doorway, hand raised to rap his knuckles softly against the doorframe.

They have yet to install the doors.

“Hey.” Thomas’ voice is already thickened with sleep. The sound makes Newt’s lip curl fondly up at the edge.

“Hey. You left your iPod.” Newt gestures idly at him with the small device held loosely in his hand. Then there is a change to his voice, a lowering and softening. “…And I thought it would be an excuse to come into your room and find out what you like to wear to bed.”

Thomas is still a moment. The wind moves the branches of the trees outside the walls, and stretched out over the roof.

Then he stands, leaving the bed and revealing the answer in a set of black boxer shorts, and nothing more.

The air between them crackles, charged and ionic. The floorboards under Thomas’ feet creak as he moves across the room to the door.

“Disappointed?”

Newt’s mouth opens, tongue curling into his cheek as if to say he is anything but. Yet his eyes light and his hand moves to Thomas’ hip to take the thin fabric of his shorts between his thumb and fingers like he could tug them off him right then and there. “Honestly, a little.”

Thomas smiles softly. There is hardly any space left between them now. Only room enough for the question that lives in the movement of Thomas’ hand coming up to curl gently around the side of Newt’s neck. Asking.

The mischief is gone from Newt’s eyes now, and his answer is a warning. “My flight leaves in two weeks.”

“Then we better not waste any more time.” But Newt is already moving into him.

An ecstatic little breath escapes from Thomas into the sudden airlessness of the room before their mouths come together, open and immediate and needy. The barest touch of Newt’s fingertips at the base of his throat is enough to move him backward across the room to the bed.

They tumble to the mattress, awkward and bumping together. Tangled and laughing.

And just like that, everything changes.

~ ~ ~

Thomas still brews them coffee in the mornings, Newt, tea in the afternoons, and they sit at the rickety card table passing steaming mugs and kisses and conspiring like mice.

But now, when Thomas stands over the coffee pot, rumple-haired and gilt-edged in the kitchen’s white-gold morning light, Newt backs him up against the counter, fist twisting hungrily in his collar and hips grinding into each other making an unholy lot of noise against the cabinet doors. Now, Thomas follows Newt into the shower, his blunt, callous-tipped fingers sliding the lather in endless fascinated abstract patterns over lengths of smooth, marble-white skin under the curling steam, and they forget where they are until the water in the pipes starts to lose its heat.

They go out on the balcony – once Thomas has deemed it safe to hold them – where Newt invariably ends in a lanky-legged straddle over Thomas’ thighs in the local yard-sale patio chair Thomas found for him, a slim arm draped recklessly over each shoulder to offer him the cigarette held lightly between his lips for a light. Or pressed back against the railing, head thrown back and lit smoke dangling scandalously from his fingers and rebelliously trailing ash. All but forgotten as Thomas whispers and nips and sucks lurid, aching, covetous marks into his throat, while the hands gripping the railing on either side of him turn desperate, bloodless white at the tips and the creases of the knuckles.

Newt hardly ever sleeps in his bedroom anymore, and by the time the date of his departure draws near, they have all but given up on any of their work getting finished at all. Even Thomas’ most favoured pet project of the addition of built-in bookcases in the Nursery, the ones he spends hours sanding by hand to a silken smooth finish, whispering his most quiet secrets and promises into the wood, has gone untouched for days.

On this particular morning, however, Newt has forgone the balcony altogether.

Thomas comes blinking and bearlike out into the yard to find him seated on a broad tree stump – smoke from his cigarette curling thinly away into the breeze, hair that has lengthened over the summer flopping forward a bit into his eyes where he leans over his sketchbook.

Thomas tucks himself in beside him, arm stretching out behind him to place his coffee cup down on the hewn surface of the stump next to him, and staying there. Newt’s smirk stretches the side of his mouth and bunches up his right cheek when he feels the familiar weight of Thomas’ chin come to rest curiously on his shoulder.

“Wow. That’s really great.” Thomas removes himself just far enough to say the words over the edge of his own cup. “I never noticed how much detail there is in a clover leaf, it’s beautiful.”

Newt smiles quietly. He brings his smoke up to his mouth for a short pull before handing it over to Thomas and going for the cup set down beside him instead.

“I actually came out here for the dew.”

Newt flips backward a page in his book and Thomas gasps, all sincerity, and nearly ends up doubled forward over the grass, choking on smoke. It’s the southern façade of the house herself, accurate in breathtaking, minute detail but changed, warping and stretching and magnified impossibly, reflected in the curving meniscus of a single bead of dew – a tiny, encompassing silver globe enthroned on a leaf of clover just as nuanced and shaded in as the one Newt has just flipped away out of sight.

Newt’s eyes are lit with a fond ruefulness that can’t hide a hint of true concern as Thomas gives a couple recovering coughs.

“Alright Tommy?”

Thomas shakes his head, eyes welling. “Your _talent_.”

“Lot of good it’s done me.” Newt snaps his sketchbook shut to set it aside.

Thomas frowns at the sudden despondent sound in it, but Newt simply holds out his fingers in a wordless request for the return of his smoke.

“Newt,” Thomas insists as he passes it obligingly back, voice still slightly rough, but earnest. “I honestly can’t get over you, dude. You’re amazing.”

Newt takes another long pull of smoke, and changes the subject.

“Amazing or not, I guess I stayed out here a little longer than I realized,” he says, raising his coffee cup at Thomas in an acknowledging little salute of thanks, and taking a businesslike tone. “So. Any thoughts on what we should do about the grass?”

“The grass?”

“Something’s killed the grass.” Newt’s fingers trail in idle affection through the blades fringing the stump under his legs, nodding indicatively at a spot not far off from them in the lawn. “You see that patch of clover, yeah? Something’s killed the grass there and left a bald patch, and then the weeds’ve grown in.”

Thomas gets to his feet, moving to the spot Newt points out with his cigarette.

“What do you reckon, just the shade from the tree that used to be here, taking the sun? Maybe the roots, choking it?”

Thomas looks down at the patch of clover, and then all around.

It is an almost visible thing, the way Thomas solves a problem – cerebral puzzle pieces falling into place behind his acute amber gaze, the same way it happens when he looks at one of Newt’s drawings and brings them to solid, tangible life. Turning the elegant doming of an archway into forthright, exacting geometry. Tape measure and muttering and cheerfully scribbled equations giving each gingerbread curlicue on a pillar or the swizzle of a railing spindle its carefully calculated, load-bearing due.

“Shoes.”

“What?”

“There’s actually two clover patches, see?” Thomas brushes the toe of his own shoe over the edge of the nearest one. “How it’s almost two long lines? It’s like somebody’s shoes were dragging through the grass, over and over, and it just wore it away. Like dangling from a swing.”

“Tree swing,” he adds, turning briefly back toward Newt and his perch on the stump. He pushes his hands into his pockets. “…I think there used to be kids here.”

Newt looks wonderingly at him, letting a moment tick by in the sunshine and pull up the corner of his mouth, before he follows the way Thomas’ gaze has turned to the house and risen up to the gleaming, freshly painted dormers as if he can hear the echo of the days when shorter footsteps pattered down the halls, the Nursery full of lullabies and story time mermaids, talking beasts, pirates and evil queens.

Thomas has seen the notch in the sitting room baseboard of course, where it is pocked and discoloured by the sudden escape of a hard red India-rubber ball. He knows the squeak that developed at the top of the stairs where heavy feet would stop; weary backs bending to retrieve the cornsilk-haired doll always left out on the stairs no matter how many scoldings might have been given.

But there is something else, too.

Thomas saunters back to stand over Newt, offering him a hand up.

“Come on,” he says, as Newt accepts it in spite of the dubious intrigue written clearly in his hesitating smile. “I wanna show you something.”

“I’ve been putting off painting over it,” Thomas admits, when he has brought Newt back inside, up the stairs, and here, to the closet in the Nursery.

“A growth chart,” Newt breathes, in quietly awed recognition, when Thomas opens the door. “Careful Tommy, you’ll have everybody thinking you’re nothing but a big old softie at heart.”

But he is already crouching low, reaching out to run his fingers down the laddered list of names and dates that climb inch by hard won inch, year by indelible year, up the wall at the back.

\----- _Maisie, April 1942_

A fiery temper and kinky, frizzy curls that never met a hairbrush they could not defeat.

\----- _Jesse, X-mas Eve ‘48_

Round, happy cheeks and laughing brown eyes – as wide and curious as Thomas’, and nearly as dark as Newt’s.

“Wow.” Newt’s finger stops on a measurement that stands out from its mates, the year and the hand it was written in both cheerfully out of step with the little parade of entries. “Grandchild?”

“Or the new tenants were as cheeseball and sappy as I am, about keeping the old tradition around.” Thomas shrugs, he runs a hand lovingly up the door jamb a little ways before leaning absently against it.

Newt clucks his tongue at him, but he is still reading down the chart, eyes glowing with interest and amusement as he checks for more little treasures to peek out at him like candy eggs at Easter.

He finds one. Sitting on its own, less even than a foot from the floor, labled simply:

\----- _Chloe._

The two turn to each other to share a knowing look. “_Cat_,” they agree, in unison, before dissolving into soft laughter.

“Oh!” Newt tuts the sudden syllable sharply, so that there is almost an audible ‘p’ after it, as he straightens up to standing, coming eye to eye again with Thomas. “Eyelash. Hold still.”

Thomas complies, freezing obediently in his relaxed position against the door frame and shutting his eyes, tipping his face upward to let Newt scoop the offending lash gently off of his cheek with a finger.

Their faces are very close together now, and when Thomas opens his eyes, they are holding a very definite and certain look.

“Uh-uh!” Newt stops him before he can come forward far enough for a kiss. “None of that. We have scrollwork to finish. And you’ve got a wish to make.”

“Wish?”

“Mmm hmm. Close your eyes.” Newt laughs at the way Thomas’ nose scrunches doubtfully, then he brings the tip of his eyelash-laden finger up in front of it to demonstrate. “Then you just make a wish, and then blow it away.”

“Like a birthday candle?”

“Hey, I don’t make the rules,” Newt informs him, as Thomas takes hold of his hand at the wrist, keeping their eyes locked significantly on each other, before closing them as instructed. “I just enforce them,” he concludes, when the wish has been made and the eyelash has been blown rather suggestively to the floor.

When Thomas opens his eyes this time there is a light of challenge in them now that will not be denied. “Ask me what I wished for.”

“Never. You’re not supposed to tell or it won’t come true.”

Thomas smiles rakishly at him, like he has a secret. His hands move to the hem of Newt’s shirt. “I have a good feeling about this one.”

“You’re playing with fire, mate, and I’ll have no part of it.” Newt presses a single finger to Thomas’ shoulder, turning him on the spot so as to let him pass by on his way to the door.

“Okay then guess.” Thomas follows swiftly after him, making a lunge for the edge of his shirt again only for Newt to dodge him at the doorway. “It’s not telling if you guess it.”

“_Scrollwork_.” Newt reminds him firmly, darting away into the hall to hide his burgeoning smirk.

“Come on, Newtie!”

Newt whirls around under the light sconce on the wall, to point a vehement finger at him. “Never call me that again.”

But it gives Thomas the second he needs to catch him, fist tangling opportunistically in the bottom of his shirt. “Deal. _If_ you guess.” 

They are both grinning now, as they come full circle to pile up against the wall, Thomas’ hand flattening out against the new wallpaper next to Newt’s head.

“You’ll jinx it!” Newt protests, through his laughter. “Tommy, you’ll ji—” but his warnings die away as Thomas’ other hand comes up to gently take his chin.

The kiss Thomas tips him forward into is slow, and lingering and long, and neither one of them is breathing steadily when it ends.

“Wow.”

“Mmm,” Newt agrees.

Thomas pulls back just far enough to look at him a moment, dragging a slow finger along the edge of his jaw in a way that makes Newt’s eyes stutter involuntarily shut. “Guess what.”

“Oh, no.”

Thomas leans in again to trace the up-tilted tip of his nose all the way up the delicate bridge of Newt’s. He nuzzles so close their lips are brushing when he gives his answer.

“It came true,” he murmurs, closing his mouth softly over Newt’s for a second time. “Twice.”

Newt’s left eyebrow is quirking up toward the ceiling before the last kiss even breaks. “You’re a bit of a cheeseball, sappy bloke, Thomas, anybody ever tell you that?”

Thomas’ answering grin is his widest yet. “Nope.”

This time when he leans back into him, Newt pushes his tongue into Thomas’ mouth and his hand to his shoulder, spinning them both about in the hall to reverse their positions. Thomas makes a not-unhappy sound of muffled surprise, when his shoulder blades meet the cashmere wallpaper, which Newt swallows confidently as his thigh wedges in between Thomas’ to knock incautiously against the carefully-retouched wainscoting, and his hands find their way urgently to his belt buckle.

And they get to the scrollwork, eventually.

~ ~ ~

The night before Newt’s flight, there is a storm.

They lie together on the wide double mattress in the centre of the bare floor that makes up Thomas’ idea of a makeshift bed, sheltered from the tumult rampaging outside her walls and buffeting on her shingles, safely cocooned in their nest of down and blankets.

Thomas’ fingers travel up the length of Newt’s arm and back down in quiet, sated contemplation while the lightning flashes outside the window at unpredictable intervals. Each one lighting Newt’s pale skin ghostly blue, an electric moment suspended in the dark of the room, like fragments of frozen time.

Thomas’ sigh is drowned in the thunder that rattles the transoms, and the lament of the wind wailing under the eaves and howling over the mouth of the chimney. But Newt can feel it, under his chin. His hand moves to smooth soothingly over the aggrieved catch and break in the steady rise-and-fall of his chest.

“Newt. Listen, I really w—"

“I know, Tommy. Me too,” Newt vows, raising his head off Thomas’ shoulder as if to make his unnamed oath into the hopeful brown eyes. “Me too.”

But he falls short, hand moving again to cradle the rough edge of Thomas’ jaw tenderly in his palm and eyes dropping to where his thumb dents his lip, instead. And Newt closes the little space between their mouths, taking any further words from him with a kiss that is different to their usual soft explorations, or tight-grinning-lipped exchanges of coquettish banter – almost more conversation at times, than kiss.

Newt’s kiss now is firm, quelling, a silencing seal over this thing between them that won’t seem to be put into words. Fierce and hot, and they tangle together, rolling over into each other again, and the sounds of their second farewell that night – but not their last – carry through the nighttime quiet to the gables and the coffers of the ceilings on the wings of late summer thunderclaps and the drumming of the rain.

Thomas wakes in the morning to the house empty and tomb-quiet, hours before Newt should have been due to leave. His key on the countertop is a needless silver weight atop the equally purposeless yellow sticky note:

_Text when I land. _

_-N._

Thomas takes himself back to bed.

Hours later, he is in the middle of standing listlessly in the kitchen when he is interrupted in his blank stare into the inoperant coffee maker by the sound of pounding at the front door.

Thomas’ head lifts uncertainly and his features move into a rare frown. It’s unusual for anyone to come this far up the hill, and it is too much of a trip down the long drive to the house to make by mistake. The lines of his back set themselves in a vigilant cast, and his step is unsure in the hall.

“Yeah, yeah, what the – BE RIGHT THERE!!” he calls, irritably, when the pounding takes impatiently up again, just as he is reaching the knob and turning the latch to crack open the heavy oaken door.

“No bat?”

Newt. Weighed down with the straps of several bags over his shoulders, and his guitar case laid behind him on the portico against the backdrop of the pelting rain, tapping out its unrelenting symphony of unasked questions and things never said. His hair is matted uncharacteristically down and dripping into his eyes, which look darker than their usual; wide onyx pools underpinned with deep, tired smudges the colour of bruises. His left arm is wrapped around the pot of the rosebush he is hugging protectively to his chest.

“Oh my God.”

They are a jumble of motion after that, Thomas managing to fumble two of the heaviest bags off Newt’s shoulder into the hall in one brief struggling motion. And then he is diving for him, both hands sliding past the rosebush’s greenery – tall enough now to come up to Newt’s cheek – to take his face between his hands and kiss him like he has spent the last hours treading water, and Newt just might be his final breath before he sinks beneath the tide.

Thomas pulls Newt in, moving him over the threshold without letting him out of the kiss, crowding disbelievingly closer and closer to him until their bodies come pressing into each other after Newt’s back finds the newel post at the bottom of the staircase.

“Newt.” Both their cheeks are wet now, with rain or something more, as Thomas breaks away from him. Breathing hard and aiming his confession deep and desperate into his eyes, thumbs scraping urgently back and forth along his cheekbones. “I lied,” he admits, voice cracking a little in places. “I lied about my wish.”

Newt’s laugh is still low and melodious, but it jangles with something manic and near-breaking, this time.

“I’m glad. It would make the message I just sent Janson, giving up my commission and wiring him another twenty-four thousand pounds to buy him out of his share a bit awkward if you hadn’t.”

Thomas’ eyes are the size of new summer moons, and several times as bright.

“You’re staying?”

“Well, I mean, I haven’t finished the crown moulding you asked me about on that bookcase of yours, so.”

His laugh is as tinny and almost-broken as Newt’s. “You’re really going to stay?”

“Long as you’ll have me.”

Thomas takes Newt’s things upstairs and asks him if they are going to stop pretending anybody is going to sleep in his bedroom ever again now, and Newt answers with the question of whether he’s ever planning on buying them an actual bed.

And just like that, the old house on the hill is a home again.  
  
  


~ ~ ~

  
  
  
  
  



	2. Bone

Thomas stands numbly at the kitchen sink, watching the slide of the soap suds, like slow garden slugs, toward the drain, curling around the shattered remains of his coffee mug in the sink – or passing right through them, slicing themselves irresistibly in two in the name of their fated journey past the sharp porcelain bergs.

It is the same cup he has been washing and using carefully for days. The single survivor left standing in the cupboard by the unnameable shade that moved into the house as the fall wind changed, and grew claws that seemed to reach in toward them, piercing the joints in the windows and slipping in under the doors and over the thresholds.

It is nothing much, at first, but an odd disruption in the easy synchronicity the two had struck since the early days of their arrival. Newt, waking now and then in the night, to lie staring fitfully at the ceiling until he inevitably gives up on the possibility of sleep, leaving the bed with a resigned sigh to slip quietly down the stairs and drift through the house like a wisp in the dark. Thomas, arriving in the kitchen muzzy and hunch-shouldered in his cozy hooded sweatshirts hours later, to find Newt staring out the garden window and turning down his offer to join him in their habitual morning ritual of coffee, having already fixed himself tea in the wan light of pre-dawn. 

Concern sets the line of his mouth and settles in his eyes and Thomas goes to him, wrapping him up in a bear hug that Newt leans indulgently backward into, smiling gamely and assuring him it’s just a little insomnia. Happens almost every year, he says, around the time the clocks change.

But the change doesn’t end with clocks, or the seasons or the shifting of the daylight.

Newt’s quietly amused smirk and his thoughtful demeanour dampen and turn sombre, unexplained. His enthusiasm and energy for their work and his joys alike take on a strange ebb and flow, until it is only ebb. And Thomas takes him by the wrists, and he strokes his palm over his hair, he begs and cajoles and threatens him into settling down for naps he finally tries, and fails, to take.

Little by little, the loss of sleep seems to toll and his movements to slow, and almost stiffen. His sketchbook is put aside, the paintings in his bedroom-turned-studio go unfinished and the long-necked bass guitar stays forgotten in its case, his fingers seeming to lose their knack for anything much more than holding a cigarette.

His nails are bitten right down to the quicks.

The quirk that normally manifests as a sort of nonchalant, characteristic shuffle changes too, chipping and fracturing and crumpling in on itself, culminating in the gradual revelation of what is a definite and recognizable limp. And Newt spends longer and longer each day on the old divan in the empty, dusty little conservatory as if he is chasing what little remains of the autumn sun. Staring into the middle distance with his hands wrapped seekingly around the heated walls of a mug of tea, swathed in blankets and with his leg stretched gingerly out in front of him so he can dig his fingers idly in under the kneecap, pressing his thumbs hard into the long bone of his right shin.

The entire house aches for him. Newt’s pain seeps into her very bones, his suffering bleeding into the foundations and radiating through the lathing of the walls. Shuddering up the studs and the beams until the rafters are shivering with it, groaning in sympathy and the cruelty of the coming winter whipping in the wind.

Upstairs on the wide, drafty sill of the library, the English rose goes thirsty, and wilts.

So it goes, as the days turn into weeks and then there Thomas stands, at a bleak and jagged-edged loss over the shards of his smashed and shattered cup. It isn’t as though he has lost track of the others, scattered before the storm that has blown through their once-simple, happy routine.

There is the fluted, grandomotherly pink-flowered one with the gold rim, left sitting on the studio floor, where a canvas which to all appearances was to be a study of a pair of hands that look an awful lot like Thomas’ still sits on the easel, and waits. The hand-fired earthenware one, out on the balcony, full now of rainwater and cigarette ends, and very likely pigeon scat. The chipped black and red one obnoxiously sporting the words _World’s Okayest Brother_ sits atop Newt’s abandoned sketchbook, its base blotting an indelible ring into the pages which have been left open to a half finished smudged-charcoal depiction of a pair of child-sized shoes, in the fashion of a time long before Newt’s own, the toes skimming themselves through a lush patch of finely detailed clover. As if dangled playfully from a swing.

Thomas could find them all easily enough, he passes them by each morning on his new, ghostlike wanderings through the house. But he hasn’t yet found the heart to collect them, not having dared since shortly after Newt seemed to lose the energy or the thought for clearing up after himself, as if knowing for days before it happened that these reminders, the little vestiges of Newt’s passions and his comforts would be all that were left him, on the wet-blanket-grey November morning that he wakes to find Newt has finally withdrawn so far into himself that nothing remains of him in the house but the second yellow sticky note. Five short words that still sit now, days later, just where Newt left them on the counter:

_You deserve happiness. _

_Not this._

_-_ _♡ __N._

Thomas walks the house, shuffling vaguely through the rooms each morning and afternoon as if expecting to find him suddenly there, wrapped around the warmth of one of the cups, and he works. Harder it seems, but without much progress to show for it, and he takes a hammer to the Nursery bookcase, which definitely undoes more of Thomas’ hard work than it accomplishes.

It is in finally standing still, however, struck motionless in the kitchen over the final cup in the pantry, this last, shattered, straw, that Thomas takes notice at last of something. Something aside from Newt, missing.

“_Cortez_.”

Thomas stares into the empty sill facing him over the sink for minutes before he is giving up on what to do about the cup, turning away from the sink to dig hurried and clumsy in his pocket for his phone. Newt hasn’t answered a text in days, but the call goes through on the third ring.

To silence.

“Newt,” Thomas says anyway, desperate. Grasping. “Please, just. Don’t hang up. Okay?”

Thomas takes the distant-sounding sniff as the only answer he is going to get, and a deep breath. And then, he tells Newt everything.

Everything he has muttered listlessly over solitary cups of coffee and whispered, wraithlike, into the bathroom mirror for days.

He tells him that when they decided to do this, they were deciding to do all of it. That when people choose each other, they do it so they won’t have to do the hard parts alone.

And if there's anything these past couple nights have taught him, it's that he’d rather be with Newt, even when they’re doing not so great, than be doing great without him.

He tells him that when they chose each other, the day Newt came back to him and stood on the porch in the rain, he chose _all_ of him. And that having Newt at his worst is more than worth the absolute high that they are when they're at their best. He tells him any idiot could take one look at Newt and know that it's a privilege, and an honour, to be his foundation and his strength, and his crutch to lean on when he doesn't feel his own.

And can he just. Please. Fucking come home.

Because Thomas is really fucking sick of crying.

Newt’s text comes in seconds after the call-ended message lights his screen. An address. For the Morning Primrose Motel, off the highway twenty miles outside out of town.

And then:

_Please come get me. I’m really fucking sick of it too. _

_And I want to go home._

Thomas has the truck’s keys in hand and is out the front door before his screen has even gone dark again.

When they get back, Thomas takes Newt out to the conservatory to sit him down on the divan and hold both his hands tightly in his lap, only ever breaking his disbelieving stare of relief into Newt’s red-rimmed eyes to lean forward and kiss him every time he dares so much as a sniffle. When the intensity in the air finally softens a touch and their breathing has evened out enough for Thomas to let him speak, Newt’s voice still carries a tremble but his words are inescapably firm, as he explains what it is that happened. That he’s sorry.

That it will happen again. 

It’s just the way he’s made, he explains, with a weariness in his voice that says he has had to tell this story far too many times before. It’s not a bit of broken crown moulding, he tells him, not a wonky cabinet or peeling plaster. That Thomas can’t fix him with his ‘magic hands’.

“Then I won’t,” Thomas says simply, squeezing where those hands still clutch Newt’s feverishly in his lap like if he lets go for even a moment he could slip away from him again. “I won’t fix you.”

Newt’s head shakes gently and his mouth opens again but Thomas doesn’t wait.

“But I will always, _always_ come get you. Do you understand me? There’s nowhere you can go that I won’t come for you if you ask me. Primrose Motel, or the Pyramids of Giza, or… I don’t know, _Denver_. Even just so deep inside your own head you think you’ll never find your way back out. I’ll be there.” Thomas pauses to let his promises settle and land. “I’d follow you anywhere, Newt. London, if you need me to.”

Newt shuts his eyes on the softly stunned look shining in them, as if finally so tired he could sleep for a week.

“Tommy.” They are still closed, when he gives Thomas his reply. “If you’re saying that you’ll have me. Have this, as I am. As I’m always going to be…”

Newt opens his eyes to move them over the empty, dusty corners of the conservatory, into the kitchen where Thomas is halfway through replacing the cupboard door handles, like he is seeing it all for what it once was. What, if the two of them have their way, it will be again.

Then he aims them at Thomas to look him straight in the eyes, and he grips both his hands tight.

“Then how could there be any place I’d rather be?”

Thomas takes a breath. He heaves a sigh that sounds as if it comes all the way from his toes, and the smile returning to his features has him looking like himself again, for the first time in days.

“That sounds perfect to me.”

~ ~ ~

It isn’t perfect, but it is something like it.

In the morning there is sunshine, dancing over the spun-lace patterns of frost glittering on the fallen leaves that blanket the yard. And Newt stands in the early winter bright of the kitchen, diligently washing his tea cups under the watchful eye of Cortez on the windowsill, his posture set and his expression determined.

And then there is Thomas, crowding up behind him. Bracketing him warmly in against the basin with a hand coming down on either side of his hips and leaning in to murmur sweet nonsense and sugary nothings into his ear, his hair, his skin where it disappears under the collar of Thomas’ soft white t-shirt that fits him just a little too loosely, until Newt is smiling, flicking at him with dish suds, and telling him to make himself useful and brew the bloody coffee. And Thomas smiles a softly pleased smile and puts a single kiss into the centre of his nape, and he does.

Though he finds a tea towel and helps Newt finish drying all the cups first.

They hang a wreath on the door and mistletoe in the hall and Thomas is thrilled nearly speechless when Newt goes out and finds them a tiny little menorah to place on the windowsill next to Cortez.

In the spring, icicles form on the gutters and the bare branches of the trees and start to drip, and when the earth is soft and the frost is gone, Newt plants his rosebush, to finally and firmly put down its roots out in the garden. In the north-east corner, where it can still be seen from the balcony, or just inside the French doors.

And when Thomas comes to steal his cigarette and interrupt his sketching with the soft weight of his chin on his shoulder, and ask him whether his roses have a name, Newt smirks quietly and surprises him with an answer:

Elizabeth.

Summer comes and goes in its haze of aviators and bare arms and cicada-song, the truck’s engine growling and coughing and bursting to life in the sunny, saturated breeze in the drive. And on the night Thomas finally finishes the bookcase, Newt comes home with a bottle of something that pops and bubbles and fizzes, and they drink it on the balcony out of their mismatched tea cups and make out in the second-hand patio chair, until Newt steps back to nudge Thomas’ legs apart at the thighs with the bottle and sink down in between them, declaring firmly that this occasion calls for a _real_ celebration.

Then when the days start to shorten and the nights to draw in, and the dark hand of winter begins to close its fingers slowly in over the gables and the wide windows, letting in the creeping chill – the three of them batten down.

Newt’s movements still stiffen and slow, he smokes too much and he sits in the bath for far too long. But there she can hold him, cradled in what peace and comfort that only home can offer, until Thomas comes, true as solid, oaken timbers and steady as foundation, to get him before the water can grow too cold, and coax him out with hot tea and fluffy towels. And instead of spending his hours staring despondently into the mug Thomas presses carefully into his hands, he takes it in and climbs into bed. And Thomas cancels all his jobs and climbs in next to him, and there they stay, until the light comes back to his eyes and the steel is back in his stance, and Newt shines for him like the sun again.

And then. One golden, flawless week in September, the house sits alone, silence filling up the empty space in the library where the missing melodies of Newt’s composing would bloom gradually to life, and the air in the hallways is quiet as a bereft sigh after the clamouring din of Thomas’ power tools whining and banging up the cellar stairs.

But they come back to her with new platinum-bright rings on their hands and indomitable smiles that won’t stay off their faces. They drive delicate gold finishing nails into the plaster and hang up pictures of themselves grinning uncontrollably in dark sunglasses and garishly printed shirts, or bedecked in elaborate flowered crowns at sunset, standing hand in hand and gazing vowingly into one another’s eyes, and Newt paints tranquil beach scenes and towering North Shore surf, and fire dancers against starlit volcanic backdrops for weeks.

And after he has finished, each time without fail, Thomas interrupts Newt cleaning his brushes.

He will press kisses over the streak of pacific blue marking his cheek, or the blot of hibiscus red above his eyebrow, until he is bent backward and chuckling over the water running in the basin, swirling with pineapple yellow and hula-skirt green, or the violet-magenta-orange of a tropical sky at twilight. And Newt will roll his eyes, unable to hide his indulgent smile as Thomas turns him gently from his task, pushing his thumb across the smudge of volcanic sand black on the inside of his wrist, drawing him insistently into his arms, and grinning the reminder that ‘nobody said the honeymoon had to be over just yet’ into their kisses.

And Newt’s lip will catch between his teeth and his head will shake as he lets himself be towed off to the shower, or a bark of surprised laughter will leave his throat as Thomas’ hands go unexpectedly to his hips to hoist him up onto the counter. But then, Newt’s legs will hook themselves around the small of Thomas’ back to bring him close and keep him there, and he will gasp, softly, when Thomas’ fingers push up under his shirt at the back and find his skin, and he will kiss him deeply, long, and slow.

And it might not be perfect. But it isn’t a far way off.

~ ~ ~ ~


	3. Of Petal and Thorn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An Epilogue

The old house sits high on a hill, not far out of town.

The windows are wide and sunlit, the portico proud and welcoming. Hung with a hand-crafted signboard over the bell that reads _Rosewood Music Academy,_ lettered out in gold leaf and black.

The briary rose painted into its flourish matches the one clutched in the claw of the stylized Lobster logo on the back of the gleaming new van, just pulling up in the long driveway, emblazoned enterprisingly with _Cortez Custom Carpentry – bespoke cabinetry and furniture design._

The man who steps out of it is young and straight-shouldered strapping, with happy brown eyes and a smile as welcoming as the house herself.

“You can come on in!” Thomas calls out in greeting to the boy in the yard, seated in the recent addition of a new tree swing. “He’ll be just about finishing up with his last session.”

A pint-sized pair of sneakers drag to an exuberant stop through the clover, and make their way over the lawn, past the rosebushes – Elizabeth and Elizabeth II, blooming in their full springtime glory – and up the steps. The shorter, pattering footsteps follow alongside their guides’, past the sketches of hibiscus lying on the tiki-themed table in the hall and the red-India-rubber notched baseboard, up the stairs and over the squeaky one where a certain doll once so often rested a cornsilk-haired head.

The last few strains of several instruments can be heard dying away as they come to the door of the library to find Newt standing tall and steely straight-backed – scattered cut-glass rainbows playing over his flaxen-gilt hair, and long-necked bass slung over his angular shoulder – in front of a short bank of recording equipment and a computer screen split into displays of a variety of faces, all with intent expressions over their respective instruments, sheets and tablatures. 

“Well guys, I think we’ve got a few really solid tracks laid out. I’ll run it through the program and just bung it in the drive – drop a link in the Discord, yeah?”

A collection of voices answers him, some with a comfortably local charm, and others that carry more of a twang. Some with the same inviting come-from-away note of adventure that rings in his own.

“Yeah let’s call it day, I’m starved.”

“You’re always starving.”

“Good thing you’re always cooking.”

“Wow, you two really need to get that room, already.”

“You do know what ‘roommate’ means, right?” comes the reply, just as a slightly higher, female-pitched one chimes “_Jea-lous,_” in sarcastic sing-song.

“Hey, if there’s a man who can taste Fry’s lasagne and not fall arse over teakettle in love with him, then I haven’t met him.”

“And who’d want to, frankly?” Thomas’ interruption spurs a cacophony of greetings from the screen, all of them enthusiastic and friendly – and one just a little bit crude. His answering grin is as warm as the hand on the young boy’s shoulder, as he gives him a gesture of encouragement to walk in across the library’s sunlit walnut floor – and waits until after he has done so, to return the crude one from the screen.

  
“So, Thomas tells me your mother signed you up for piano lessons for the year,” Newt addresses his new student, tipping his head to the side to duck out from under the strap over his shoulder and earning a look of envious admiration. “…But what you’d really like is to learn the guitar.”

The boy pulls a wry face, and nods a head of curls that likely never met a hairbrush they could not defeat.

“Well.” Newt gives him an understanding smile. “If I know anything about women—” but he is interrupted by an impressively loud snort from the laptop still showing several of the bandmembers packing away their equipment, including a young man about Newt’s own age with spiky black hair, and another with a pair of astonishingly dramatic eyebrows. 

“_Which_ I’ll admit isn’t much,” Newt allows, with a roll of his dark, mirthfully glittering eyes as he reaches out for the edge of his laptop. “Good_bye._ Y’twats,” he adds firmly, before snapping it crisply shut on several responding snide snickers, leaving only the gleefully entertained one from the young boy in front of him.

“_Families_, then,” Newt amends, his eyes giving a soft, irresistible flick in the direction of the entryway where Thomas has just vacated, leaving them to their lesson. “If there’s one thing I do know, it’s that the easiest route to a happy life is to keep one happy yourself. Compromise is key. So.”

  
His voice takes on a conspiratorial tint as he turns to set the instrument in his hand carefully on its stand. “Why don’t we get started on the piano, and then if there’s time at the end, I can show you the proper way to hold mine, and maybe teach you your first chord?”

“Okay,” he agrees, the first sign of hope lifting his voice and showing on the young features as they make their way to the piano, where something sitting atop it makes him draw up short. “Hey—”

“That’s Cortez,” says Newt. “My trusted assistant. He makes sure your music sheets won’t blow away when this place basically turns into a bloody greenhouse in the summer, and we open up all the windows.”

A grin stretches the round, happy cheeks and lights up a set of laughing brown eyes as wide and curious as Thomas’, and nearly as dark as Newt’s, as he reaches up a finger to scratch under the tiny silver chin.

“Hi Cortez,” the newest newcomer giggles, bringing his hand back down to catch the beam of the stray rainbow reaching out to him from the window on his palm. “I’m Chuck.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Chuckie,” Newt replies, putting out his hand for a shake, too. Then he pulls out the piano bench to get them both settled.

The old house doesn’t echo anymore, too full of music and light and mess and noise. Voices and laughter, and love. But the new name slips neatly right in between.

_Chuck_. It settles comfortably in the air, spreading happily out and finding its place under the roof, and within her walls.

_Welcome_.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  
_~Of brick and of bone,_

_ Of petal and thorn,_

_ My love is my harbour, my hearth and my home._


End file.
